The World Wide Web is Online (PCGH-Retro, April 30)

… 1993: The World Wide Web is already a few years old in 1993, but something was still missing for the real worldwide breakthrough: the technology needed to create your own web server including HTML files was not freely available. The number of servers in the network is therefore still quite manageable. That changes on April 30: On this day, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), whose employee Tim Berners-Lee developed the WWW, releases the source code of the server software called “libwww”. free for everyone – and unlike what was originally planned, completely free of charge, without any restrictions or license fees. This is the last step on the way to a worldwide web service that is freely available everywhere, after the first truly graphics-capable browser, Mosaic, had been released a few days earlier. The WWW will soon supplant other online services such as Gopher and thus become a synonym for the Internet for many – the triumph of the Web can no longer be stopped.

… 1998: Do you know WAP? No, not BAP, WAP. Wireless Application Protocol was an attempt to prepare and deliver internet content suitable for mobile devices – however, this was an attempt that never really caught on. Initially, Internet speeds on mobile devices were too slow and access to the little content was mostly unpleasant and uncomfortable, after that the connection costs were too high. When these stumbling blocks were removed, Apple had already heralded the smartphone generation with the iPhone and made WAP obsolete almost overnight. In any case, on April 30, 1998, the first WAP specification was approved – you haven’t missed anything.